DSXchange

This may be a simple question for the right person, but we have no experience or training doing this, so not sure where to begin. We pull a lot of our data off of the mainframe and work with it and keep it on servers. We now have a case where we have server data though, that we need to convert and send a file up to the mainframe. I've used DataTypePicComp3V99 and such when going from mainframe to server. Our Server file has character fields of 8 bytes with signs and decimal points on them. We need to convert those to packed decimal with sign and V99 and send it up to the mainframe. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks. :>

Eric,

there's not routines coming with datastage to convert server data back to mainframe packed format. What you have is ascii - ebcdic conversion. Based on the existing routines you might be able to write your own routines, or someone in the community may be able to provide these.

On the other hand, do you really need to convert to packed format? I would suggest a solution to simply produce ascii data which can be very easily transfered and converted. You even would not need to do this as DS conversion since ftp is able to do this for you. This is the way I do it all the time.

It should be no problem for any ongoing mainframe process to get the data and - if it's correct numeric - store it into packed decimal target fields.

Klaus

Having produced the file it is technically easy to use FTP to send it to the mainframe. The politics of doing so, however, may prove daunting!

It may be better to produce the file on your UNIX server, and have the mainframe folks initiate an FTP session to get it from there.